A really great book that goes into this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti btw. Breaks down a lot of things that simply didn’t work in the USSR. Definitely check it out
Side question — what sort of world would you like? Not presupposing anything, or leading a question. Actually asking—what kind of structure do you think is best based on what you think humans deserve/could do?
We won't have any realistic solutions to international issues like climate change, wage/chattel slavery, and the protection of basic human rights until an international institution has the power to affect those changes.
So the question is: How does humanity enact an international representative government?
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.
lol how are you gonna be a socdem who's against vanguards when one of the core concepts of social democracy is REPRESENTATIVE parties?
Bruh you can't take a principled stance against vanguardism when your ideology is literally the capitalist liberal version of vanguardism, you got to at least be an anarchist to play that game
You don't know what a vanguard is then, ignorance while understandable in this context, is still not something to be proud of, you should take the time to learn instead of reflexively rejecting something because the capitalist zeitgeist tells you to
Vanguard parties exclude only the supporters of capitalism just like Social democracy by definition excludes socialists and non-capitalists, again you can't have any convincing principled stance against the representative democracy of the working class when you literally stan for the representative democracy of capitalists
As a socdem.
Looks around nervously.
Why though? Like not even a demsoc?
Edit: go easy on him guys
The idea of a revolutionary vanguard sounds like a bad, bad idea.
Look at what the Bolsheviks did to the Mensheviks.
...yes, and?
The USSR failed because it did not tolerate any political pluralism, and lept from crisis to crisis based on the whims of personality cults.
I guess if you like personality cults...
Well, it is true.
Doctrinaire politics reigned from on high in the USSR which forbade even alternative ideologies of communism.
would you by any chance be american?
A really great book that goes into this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti btw. Breaks down a lot of things that simply didn’t work in the USSR. Definitely check it out
nooooo if they read that they'll be able to own me so easily
Side question — what sort of world would you like? Not presupposing anything, or leading a question. Actually asking—what kind of structure do you think is best based on what you think humans deserve/could do?
We won't have any realistic solutions to international issues like climate change, wage/chattel slavery, and the protection of basic human rights until an international institution has the power to affect those changes.
So the question is: How does humanity enact an international representative government?
I wish I knew the answer to that.
Yeah I agree. Are there shortcomings of the Internationale you consider?
Yeah, it excludes non-communists.
Not everyone is a communist.
The USSR failed because the US State department lead by Hillary Fucking Clinton succesfully couped them.
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.
B A S E D
That isn’t inherent in being a communist, and especially not in being a democratic socialist.
Demsocs are utopian socialists.
I'm not utopian.
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lol MLs need to answerfor a demsoc getting downvoted?
sorry u had a shitty take bruh that doesn't mean were doing a stalinism
lol how are you gonna be a socdem who's against vanguards when one of the core concepts of social democracy is REPRESENTATIVE parties?
Bruh you can't take a principled stance against vanguardism when your ideology is literally the capitalist liberal version of vanguardism, you got to at least be an anarchist to play that game
Vanguardism can never be representative.
I reject it wholly.
You don't know what a vanguard is then, ignorance while understandable in this context, is still not something to be proud of, you should take the time to learn instead of reflexively rejecting something because the capitalist zeitgeist tells you to
Vanguard parties exclude all non-socialists.
They are anti-democratic abortions.
Vanguard parties exclude only the supporters of capitalism just like Social democracy by definition excludes socialists and non-capitalists, again you can't have any convincing principled stance against the representative democracy of the working class when you literally stan for the representative democracy of capitalists
All your doing is revealing your class loyalty
Socialism is not just MLism FFS.
Read a book.
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